While the D.C. Health Link will launch a Web site on October 1, shoppers will not have access to the their premium prices until mid-November. The delay comes after the District marketplace discovered “a high error rate” in calculating the tax credits that low- and middle-income people will use to purchase insurance on the marketplace.

The insurance marketplaces, if working as plan, are supposed to spit out an estimate for a tax credit after a shopper enters in some basic information about where she lives and how much she earns. In the District, that won’t happen next month. Instead, the eligibility determination will be made “off-line by experts” by early November…

A spokesman for the D.C Health Benefit Link tells my colleague Lena Sun that this glitch is specific to the District’s marketplace, and separate from reports on a similar challenge facing the federal marketplace.

It’s “separate” in the sense that the agencies building the local and federal marketplaces are different, but as evidence that O-Care’s not ready for prime time, they’re very much the same. The punchline here, as Ed notes via e-mail, is that WaPo was touting the D.C. exchange for small businesses just two days ago as a model of preparedness while federal administrators were busy struggling to get their own exchanges up and running by October 1. That in itself was a joke because, as Ed explained on Monday, D.C.’s a small market where the vast, vast majority already have insurance. If any jurisdiction should be ready to roll on launch day, it’s that one. Instead, the logistics of calculating subsidies for individual enrollees are evidently so daunting that Health Link had no choice but to absorb the humiliation of announcing this postponement. Imagine how tremendous the political pressure must have been from Obama’s O-Care deputies on D.C. to work out these bugs before ObamaCare opponents had another tale of disarray to spread. And still, they couldn’t figure things out. The result: A new black eye for O-Care on the very day Ted Cruz is in the news for his big anti-ObamaCare floor speech. The fact that it was Ezra Klein’s overwhelmingly pro-ObamaCare “WonkBlog” that broke the news is just icing on the cake.

Big question now: If D.C.’s in as bad a shape as this, what shape are other exchanges that need to serve bigger, more complicated markets in? I wonder if Obama and Reid might entertain a GOP demand to delay the law for awhile simply because the potential political headache of a disastrous October 1 rollout has gotten too likely and too large. They don’t want the uninsured trying to sign up next week and then getting frustrated and giving up when the websites don’t work correctly. At this point, maybe it’s worth the risk of putting the exchanges off for awhile to work out the bugs, even if that means giving the GOP more time to build grassroots opposition to the law.

Oh, by the way: Bloomberg News revealed this morning that, for the first time in his presidency, Obama’s favorable rating (which is distinct from his job approval) is now underwater. Think he’s primed right now for a big ObamaCare clusterfark in October?

I hate to say it but at this point I wouldn’t ask to delay a thing. As a matter of fact, I would fight, in court, the delays that Obama has announced based on inequality of enforcement of this fantastic law of the land.

The more the GOP screams and does all it can to prevent people from signing on to Obamacare, the more people want to sign on.
This is equivalent to when a dad yells and screams at his teenage daughter not to date the high school football QB. The more he screams, the more the girl gets drawn to the QB.
Americans know where the GOP stands with Obamacare. Allow it to launch without obstruction and then attack it if or once it starts showing signals of failure.

People, this is just a cover in the ongoing Debt Ceiling/Defund Obama Care debate. If the actual cost of an Obama Care plan became public it would undermine all of the theater going on in DC now. We simply can’t have the real world costs being made public right now can we?

Dont think Obama hasn’t hired the best and the brightest programmers to make sure this exchange works properly Oct 1st.

They are leaking rumors of software issues in order to lower the bar so to speak. And the GOP is falling for it.

loveofcountry on September 25, 2013 at 9:02 PM

Their strategy is to… make it look like a disaster everyone believes it to be to do what again? Why wouldn’t Obama want it looking flawless at this point considering the damage it’s doing to his second term? Oh wait, this is his master plan for the single payer system right? Showing just how efficient government can be…

Even with the subsidies, members of Congress and their staff will still have to get their health insurance through the exchange markets, which is prompting all kinds of confusion on Capitol Hill.

In an ominous sign today, all House staffers received an email from the chief administrative officer of the House, Dan Strodel, warning them not to enroll in the exchanges.

“This is a reminder that while the health care exchanges created under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be open for enrollment on October 1st, Members and staff are advised that they should not enroll until further guidance and clarification is provided,” the e-mail says.

A request for more information about why this warning was issued has not been returned.

Democrats thought they could just declare Obamacare roll-out dates and everything would fall into place. Just as they thought they could declare that insurance provide more benefits for lower premiums. They want it and so it will be.

Today some lefty commenter on Politico was claiming that all of the employers moving workers from full time to part time employment is a great thing because it creates more part time jobs and opportunities.

The more the GOP screams and does all it can to prevent people from signing on to Obamacare, the more people want to sign on. This is equivalent to when a dad yells and screams at his teenage daughter not to date the high school football QB. The more he screams, the more the girl gets drawn to the QB. Americans know where the GOP stands with Obamacare. Allow it to launch without obstruction and then attack it if or once it starts showing signals of failure.

loveofcountry on September 25, 2013 at 8:51 PM

That you acknowledge having the emotional depth of a teenage girl is the most refreshing bit of honesty I’ve ever encountered from a stereotypical Liberal supplicant.

And they will tax everyone retroactively, ala Clinton, even though they are the ones that screwed up. Meanwhile, millions will continue to lose their health insurance and full time employment. And, everyone else’s rates are skyrocketing in anticipation of all Obamacare’s glory.

It gives the Dems more time to figure out how to blame Republicans, because that is he goal.

I had a long argument with a guy who said over and Over that it was a Republican plan and they marked it up in committee sat in every meeting and so it is really their plan…. blah blah blah….

He even agreed that passing it on Christmas eve night was bad, locking out Republicans was bad, but the Republicans deserved it because they made a video saying that there were death panels… which there are!

But underlying all of it was that Democrats don’t want this hung around their necks.

So if they are so panicked, what is the advantage of delay?

Okay, other than sparing the country the pain of passing it I guess. But that wouldn’t stop the Democrats.

The people most hurt voted for Obama, so it is their own fault.

Of course I can actually pay the huge increase, so maybe I am not feeling it as much as I should. I am mad at being told what to do. And that I have to pay for something I don’t need… but I’ll still eat.

The more the GOP screams and does all it can to prevent people from signing on to Obamacare, the more people want to sign on.
This is equivalent to when a dad yells and screams at his teenage daughter not to date the high school football QB. The more he screams, the more the girl gets drawn to the QB.
Americans know where the GOP stands with Obamacare. Allow it to launch without obstruction and then attack it if or once it starts showing signals of failure.

loveofcountry on September 25, 2013 at 8:51 PM

However, being told ahead of time, then having it happen, does let them know that Obama lied, and Republicans didn’t.

Until the media tells them they really have been at war with Eurasia all along.

WaPo was touting the D.C. exchange for small businesses just two days ago as a model of preparedness while federal administrators were busy struggling to get their own exchanges up and running by October 1.

Clark Howard, another old media liberal, has been touting Nevada’s state exchange as an ideal model. I’m looking forward to the day when it crashes too.

The idea of Zerocare is to lead to single payer, but there’s no way in H that the proggies are smart enough to calibrate the speed of migration. They might get a little freaked out if it crashes before the end of the year.

I believe the crash was intended to be a financial crash, a Cloward-Pivening of the nation.

I wonder if Obama and Reid might entertain a GOP demand to delay the law for awhile simply because the potential political headache of a disastrous October 1 rollout has gotten too likely and too large. They don’t want the uninsured trying to sign up next week and then getting frustrated and giving up when the websites don’t work correctly. At this point, maybe it’s worth the risk of putting the exchanges off for awhile to work out the bugs, even if that means giving the GOP more time to build grassroots opposition to the law.

Dems may welcome a delay, but GOP should fight it.
Marketers know that shoppers, once burned, don’t go back.

That’s why theater and movie makers all sweat the early reviews.

We had a much-touted restaurant open here recently and it was shuttered less than 3 months later (took longer than that to renovate the building for the opening).
Bad food – word spread – no one went back for a second try and people stopped coming for the first time as well.